Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms Community Challenge (Production Phase)

Art by Maciej Drabik

ArtStation Community Challenges help you to improve your skills, connect with and learn from other artists, create new material for your portfolio and show the ArtStation Community what you’re capable of. We hope you’re ready because an exciting new ArtStation Community Challenge begins now.

The theme of the tenth ArtStation Community Challenge is Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms. We’re challenging artists to imagine a forgotten realm of fantasy creatures, fantasy races and magic.

Join the Challenge

What we’re looking for is your ability to breathe life into fantasy characters and creatures and tell their stories in a world of magic. Characters and creatures can be based on familiar races like dragons, elves, dwarves, mages or they can be new races entirely.

The Challenge starts with five Concept Art categories (Keyframe Design, Character Design, Environment Design, Prop Design and VFX Design) running for four weeks. We will then open up five Production categories (Game Character Art, Game Environment/Level Art, Film/VFX Character Art, Prop Art and Game VFX Art) which start on 16 August, 2022.

Enter Phase 2 (Production)

You can now register for the Production art categories and begin the challenge.

• Game Character Art (real-time)
• Film/VFX Character Art (rendered)
• Game Environment/Level Art (real-time)
• Prop Art (rendered)
• VFX Art (real-time)

Learning from the best

ArtStation Learning is a free learning resource with amazing videos from industry artists on many aspects of creativity and production. We’ve highlighted videos for each category of the challenge to get you started which you can find on ArtStation Learning.

• ArtStation Learning: Game Character Art (real-time)
• ArtStation Learning: Film/VFX Character Art (rendered)
• ArtStation Learning: Game Environment/Level Art (real-time)
• ArtStation Learning: Prop Art (rendered)
• YouTube (VFX Apprentice): VFX Art (real-time)

A new feedback system

An important part of ArtStation Challenges is posting WIPs so that the judges, hosts and recruiters can follow your process can give you feedback along the way. To streamline the process we’ve added a new Feedback Request feature to the challenge platform so that you can request feedback when you need it. Every artist will receive three (3) feedback requests per submission.

Deliverables

Each challenge category has its own set of requirements, so we’ve improved the way deliverables are managed to reduce the chance of incomplete entries which don’t get judged.

Challenge Hosts

In order to help you push your submission to the next level, each category has hosts to give constructive feedback on your submissions and general tips along the way. As always, we have a talented team of working artists to share their knowledge:

• Bogna Gawrońska (CD PROJEKT RED): Keyframe Design
• Rembert Montald (Riot Games): Keyframe Design
• Suzanne Helmigh (Ghostfire Gaming): Character Design
• Thomas Chamberlain-Keen (Playground Games): Character Design
• Randall Mackey (Freelance): Environment Design
• Marina Ortega (Freelance): Prop Design
• Elodie Mondoloni (Freelance): Prop Design
• Gavin Goulden (Insomniac Games): Game Character Art
• Karen Stanley (PlayStation Visual Arts): Game Environment/Level Art
• Javier Perez (PlayStation Visual Arts): Game Environment/Level Art
• Dorine Laplanche (Cyanide): Prop Art
• Jason Keyser (VFX Apprentice): VFX Design/VFX Art
• Kees Klop (VFX Apprentice): VFX Design/VFX Art

Challenge Judges

The judging panel for Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms is fantastic!

• Yekaterina Bourykina
• David Nakabayashi
• Grace Liu
• Virginie Bourdin
• Sandra Duchiewicz
• Devon Fay
• Finnian MacManus
• Conar Cross
• Tyler Smith
• Greg Rutkowski
• David Shovlin
• Sjors de Laat

Share your Progress

The official challenge hashtag is #DragonsRiseChallenge. Share your progress with us and others using the hashtag when you post updates on your other social media.

Deadlines

The concept art challenges begin on Thursday 21st July 2022 and closed on Tuesday 16th August 2022. The production challenges began on Tuesday 16th August 2022 and the entry deadlines will be Monday 3rd October 2022. The deadline to register for the production challenges is Monday 26th September 2022.

Eligibility

We’re happy to finally welcome Quebec residents to ArtStation Community Challenges. A number of countries have competition/contest legislation that makes it impractical to run our contest in its current form (Italy, Brazil). We’ll continue to investigate solutions for future challenges, but right now it’s not possible to include these locations.

Good luck!